In the technical field of multimedia, various types of ripping systems are currently developed and introduced along with an ongoing increase of hard disc capacity and an increasingly improved efficiency in data compression technique. Describing the ripping, music data recorded in a removable medium such as music CD or DVD-Video, for example, is extracted from the medium and converted into any file format that can be processed in personal computers conventionally available, an example of which is MP3 (MPEG1 Audio Layer-3) format, so that the converted data is stored in a hard disc having a large storage capacity. The ripping technique is particularly often used to convert music data recorded in music CD into MP3 data.
An invention developed for compressing CD data and ripping the compressed data in a hard disc can rip data in a plurality of recording mediums while continuing to reproduce the data already ripped from the recording medium (for example, see the Patent Document 1).
Further, there is a dubbing system configured such that information data currently copied from CD into a hard disc can be immediately reproduced randomly in any order without waiting for the data copying to be completed, and the data copying is continuously performed in the background when a condition change occurs, for example, when the CD is ejected before the data copying finishes, or when the system is shut down (for example, see the Patent Document 2).
Also available a technology wherein all of data currently copied from CD into a hard disc data can be reproduced from the hard disc and compressed at the same time (for example, see the Patent Document 3).